The Way Jude Worked Richard Brookhiser
JUDE WANNISKI (1936-2005) was the indefatigable cheerleader of supply-side economics. Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell invented the theory, and Robert Bartley, Irving Kristol, and Robert Novak championed it. But Wanniski had the most brio.
I got in on the ground floor of the supply-side revolution about as early as someone who was not a colleague of Wanniski's at the Wall Street Journal could. In 1978 a friend of mine from college was managing the New Jersey senatorial campaign of Jeffrey Bell. Bell was challenging the liberal incumbent Clifford Case in the Republican primary; if he won he would face former New York Knick Bill Bradley in the election. It was the glad confident morning of the supply-side school: Supply-siders knew the answer to all the world's problems, and the world was just about to find out. The campaign's office had a stack of Jude Wanniski's new book, The Way the World Works, which they consulted the way the Jehovah's Witnesses read The Watchtower.
Wanniski's book was important to me, as it was to the whole conservative movement in the late Seventies. He wrote in clear journalist's English that deprived economics of its terrors. The economic theory that underlay the supply- side school was simple, and commonsensical: At some point tax rates become so onerous that they generate diminishing returns. Arthur Laffer had sketched a graph shaped like a croquet wicket on a cocktail napkin to describe the interplay of tax rates and revenue. In Jimmy Carter's America, we seemed clearly to be on the downward prong.
Wanniski's insight, in The Way the World Works, was to broaden the theory beyond economics. High taxes throttled energy, intellect, and the human spirit, as well as business and government. Politically, his message was hopeful: The discontents of civilization were not caused only (or maybe not caused at all) by cultural dysfunction or human cussedness. Bad policies made for bad lives; good ones would benefit everybody. His message of hope seemed specifically targeted at conservative Republicans, whose historic concern for balanced budgets had trapped them into dour naysaying. If Republicans lowered tax rates, the resulting influx of revenues would relieve them of the necessity of wrangling over every budget line item. The GOPcould reach out to traditional Democrats, and minorities, for the rising tide would lift all boats.
If you read The Way the World Works closely, sunspots appeared. Wanniski attributed the crash of 1929, and the ensuing Depression, to tariff policy, which, even if true, seemed petty: How could such a debacle have only one cause? His view of human history was weirdly narrow. Everything in Europe between the Roman emperor Commodus, a tax raiser, and the French emperor Napoleon, a tax cutter, was a featureless sump. But in 1978 conservatives wanted to win elections for a change, and were in no mood to quibble. Bell beat Case, but lost to Bradley. Supply-siders confidently predicted that the young Republican congressman Jack Kemp would win the presidential nomination, and the White House, in 1980. He didn't, because an old former governor, Ronald Reagan, took over the supply-side message. Supply-siders always said Reagan converted because of his long-ago grounding in pre-Keynesian economics at Eureka College, and perhaps they were right. But Reagan knew a good political pitch, and one that fit his own expansive personality.
I met Wanniski for the first time when he came to post-editorial drinks in the winter of 1980-81, between Reagan's victory and his inauguration. The man was like his book. He had a genial manner and a rather high, keening voice. He radiated sweetness, innocence, and self- assurance in equal portions. His concern just then was how Kemp might spend the time before his own deferred presidency. Wanniski knew just the slot for him: ambassador to the United Nations. Why on earth? we asked. It would be his bully pulpit for converting the world to supply-side economics, Wanniski explained. The Soviet Union? we thought. Cuba? Wanniski was not fazed. "Marxists," he explained, "believe in production." This was not a whimsical remark. Wanniski later told me that his family had been working-class Communists, and that his grandfather's dying wish was that Jude write a book as important as Das Kapital. "That's what I've tried to do," he said simply. What a confluence of idealism and ignorance: the desire to change the world, the fecklessness of appropriating Marx as a model.
In office, Ronald Reagan gave the supply-side engine block a few bangs with a lug wrench, as tactical necessity required. But he basically hewed to the doctrine. Politically, it was a great victory for Wanniski and all the supply-siders. Personally, it was the worst thing that could ever have happened to Wanniski. The man who knew how the world worked had changed the world; he foresaw the rest of his life glimmering before him as a series of such successful interventions. Self-assurance became grandiosity, and worse.
In 1988 he joined a table of NR editors at the Republican convention in New Orleans. The Quayle pick had just been announced. Wanniski had found a new hero, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he called Gorby. Why wait for Jack Kemp to convert the Communist world when he might do it directly? As the years passed, Wanniski slid down the great chain of being, seeking ever more dubious acolytes. In 1992 he was hot for Ross Perot who, he told me, was sure to win in a landslide, if the American establishment did not have him assassinated. (Perot did die, politically, but it was by his own daft hand.) Next up was Louis Farrakhan. Wanniski denied that the Nation of Islam warlock was a bigot, and challenged anyone to produce a sin gle anti-Semitic statement of his ("gutter religion" is a compliment?). Wanniski opposed both Iraq wars, as did, and do, other conservatives. His critics wondered darkly whether the Iraqis paid him. If they did, they wasted their money. Returning his phone calls would have been enough. Wanniski's last proximity to almost-power came when Jack Kemp got Bob Dole's nod as running- mate in 1996. Kemp and Wanniski were both autodidacts, but Kemp always had something that Wanniski lacked, a mea- sure of modesty. Hence Wanniski always had Kemp's ear. Wanniski believed he could have turned the election to Dole- Kemp if only Farrakhan had endorsed the ticket.
My last exchange with Wanniski was by e-mail. I had gotten one of his, cc'd urbi et orbi, blasting the racism of the Founding Fathers. I was goaded to stick up for Alexander Hamilton, who had written that the "natural faculties" of blacks "are probably as good as ours." Wanniski replied that he was glad to learn it (the old sweetness). Of course, he also had not known what he was talking about-the curse of his later years.
Pundits shoot at the moving targets of events. This can make us irresponsible. But events, and our own judgments, shoot back at us. Over time we can say a lot of foolish things; let us hope that is the extent of it. When we think of Jude Wanniski, we should think of his book-to his credit, no Das Kapital.